Peggy Lee rehearsing at a Democratic rally prior to John F. Kennedy's 45th birthday in May, 1962
Photo by Yale Joel
Peggy Lee was born 102 years ago today.
Lee was a jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer and actress in a career spanning six decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, she forged a sophisticated persona — evolving into a multi-faceted artist and performer.
She wrote music for films, acted and created conceptual record albums — encompassing poetry, jazz, chamber pop and art songs.
Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, the seventh of eight children of Marvin Olof Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad, and his wife Selma Amelia (Anderson) Egstrom. Her mother died when Lee was just four years old. Afterward, her father married Min Schaumber, who treated her with great cruelty while her alcoholic father did little to stop it.
As a result, she developed her musical talent and took several part-time jobs so that she could be away from home. Lee first sang professionally over KOVC radio in Valley City, North Dakota. She later had her own series on a radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her a salary in food.
Both during and after her high school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations. Radio personality Ken Kennedy of WDAY in Fargo, North Dakota (the most widely heard station in North Dakota), changed her name from Norma to Peggy Lee. Lee left home and traveled to Los Angeles at the age of 17.
She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy and was noticed by hotel owner Frank Beringin while working at the Doll House in Palm Springs, California. It was here that she developed her trademark sultry purr – having decided to compete with the noisy crowd with subtlety rather than volume.
Beringin offered her a gig at The Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel East in Chicago. There, she was noticed by bandleader Benny Goodman.
"Benny's then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into The Buttery, and she was very impressed,” Lee recalled. “So the next evening she brought Benny in, because they were looking for a replacement for Helen Forrest. And although I didn't know, I was it.
“He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. I thought that he didn't like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing."
Lee joined Goodman’s band in 1941. In 1942, Lee had her first #1 hit, "Somebody Else Is Taking My Place," followed by 1943's "Why Don't You Do Right?" (originally sung by Lil Green), which sold over a million copies. It made her famous.
Lee was a successful songwriter, with songs from the Disney movie, Lady and the Tramp, for which she also supplied the singing and speaking voices of four characters.
Her collaborators included Laurindo Almeida, Harold Arlen, Sonny Burke, Cy Coleman, Duke Ellington, Dave Grusin, Quincy Jones, Francis Lai, Jack Marshall, Johnny Mandel, Marian McPartland, Willard Robison, Lalo Schifrin and Victor Young.
Lee was a mainstay of Capitol Records when rock and roll came onto the American music scene. She was among the first of the "old guard" to recognize this new genre, as seen by her recording music from The Beatles, Randy Newman, Carole King, James Taylor and other up-and-coming songwriters.
From 1957 until her final disc for the company in 1972, she produced a steady stream of two or three albums per year which usually included standards (often arranged quite differently from the original), her own compositions and material from young artists. Lee continued to perform into the 1990s, sometimes in a wheelchair.
After years of poor health, Lee died of complications from diabetes and a heart attack at age 81.
Ironically, Little Willie John, who co-wrote “Fever,” recorded by Lee in 1958, died on this day in a prison in 1968 at the age of 30 years old. He had been convicted two years earlier of manslaughter and sent to Washington State Penitentiary for a fatal knifing incident following a show in Seattle.